Laura Brehaut/Postmedia NewsOriginally published on March 25, 2015; Postmedia

In Leah Koenig’s “modern Jewish kitchen,” there is room for both tradition and new, vibrant flavours. Her blintzes are filled with roasted garlic-potato or orange-scented cheese, and her matzo balls are studded with sautéed jalapeño and shallots. She was raised in a Jewish home with an appreciation for Jewish foods, but didn’t learn how to cook them until she moved away for college. “I was creating my Jewish repertoire from scratch, and doing it in my twenty-first-century kitchen filled with vegetables from the farmers’ market and a sauce-splattered laptop that played music while I chopped,” she writes in her second cookbook, Modern Jewish Cooking (Chronicle Books, 2015).